Tag: WRITE

She came with a whole life and libido of her own. To speak our life as we feel it is a freedom we mostly choose not to take, but it seemed to me that the words she wanted to say were lively inside her, mysterious to herself as much as anyone else. This action of dismantling and packing up a long life lived together seemed to flip time into a weird shape; a flashback to leaving South Africa, the country of my birth, when I was nine years old, and a flash forward to an unknown life I was yet to live at 50. More urgently, I no longer had a study at the most professionally busy time in my life. What’s the point of that sort of life? As I wheeled my electric bike through the park on the way to my writing shed, my hands had turned blue from the cold. De Beauvoir knew that a life without love was a waste of time. She remained committed to Sartre being the essential love of her life for 51 years, despite their other attachments. All the same, as she had written to the writer Nelson Algren, in the flush of their new love: “I want everything from life, I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and have loneliness, to work much and write good books and to travel and enjoy myself …”.

“You must factor that in to how difficult it is to manage work and writing.” But for all the stress of brainstorming ideas during her commute and transcribing interviews in the M.T.A. break room, Gidla would never quit her day job. Some cultivate their art because it sustains their work, or because it fulfills a sense of civic responsibility. Do politics abet the artist? Unlike Williams, Rama does not borrow directly from his waking life for subject matter; he aims to explore automated and preconscious processes. At first, Islam imagined the two endeavors – the company and the writing – as “Sisters,” more similar than different. As Hi Wildflower developed into the author’s main source of income, morphing from an alternate expression of the energies that drove her fiction into “a way of keeping afloat in a society that doesn’t pay artists to do their work,” its meaning mutated. Business is where Islam works; writing is where she dreams and roams. In “A Room of One’s Own”, her famous, passionate argument about the material conditions necessary for writing, Virginia Woolf compared fiction to a “Spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.” It is a lovely vision of art hanging from the beams of reality, only people are not spiders – they don’t generate just one thing. Artists: They’re just like us, unless they can afford not to be, in which case they still are, but doing a better job of concealing it.

In other words, you need to plan tomorrow’s to-do list backwards-by thinking about your yearlong goals first. Switching careers, starting your own business, getting six-pack fit, learning a new language: Your yearlong goals can fall in any category, but they need to be big. Then you can set your sights on landing your first writing assignments for publications, building out your site, and pitching clients-all monthly goals in their own right. Week 3: Editing the six posts you wrote over the first two weeks and drafting the next three. As you move from week to week, month to month, you’ll get a feel for what’s overly ambitious vs. realistic. Spend a few minutes drafting up your top goals for the day ahead. Let’s say it’s Friday of Week 3 above, and you’re still polishing up a few items from the week before. It’s easy to see how your work today is connected to your weekly goals, which are connected to your monthly goals, which are connected to your yearly goals. The reason, as I see it, is because funneling your big-picture goals into daily action steps simply feels good.

I write about the lives of undocumented immigrants-always in the first person-and often interwoven with my own experience. I’ve found that for many immigrants clothing is a costume; it’s a deliberate choice. The only time I remember James Baldwin writing about clothes is when he remembered that, before his assassination, Medgar Evers had told him “How the tatters of clothes from a lynched body hung.” Although immigrants are said to live in shadows, I think of us differently-a lively species of wild bird that lives on the highest branches of the tallest trees deep in the jungle. I write down my lawyer’s phone number in fine-point Sharpie on my hand. Because I cannot return to my parents their youths or health or joy, because I cannot save any of the immigrants I write about, I have been contacting animal shelters so I can foster small senior dogs who are just a few months away from death, so I can love them and nurse them until they die. I am who I am-the child of immigrants, an immigrant myself, someone who runs but cannot hide from the migraines that overtake me when I think about the immigrants I write about and the long nights that await them after long days under this administration. Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is a writer, covering immigration and culture.

No. 2 surprised people-the pencil grip isn’t something a lot of adults think about. It means the child is not using his or her hand muscles efficiently, and therefore may tire out quickly, complain about arm or hand pain, or turn in illegible work. Very early on, kids should be building their fine motor skills-digging their fingers in sand, molding sculptures out of Play-Doh, tearing scraps of paper and zipping zippers-so that they have the muscles they need for pencil-gripping success. Have your kid place their writing hand in the sock, slipping their pointer finger through one hole and their thumb through the other. Here’s a video from Sara McClure of the blog Happy Brown House. Have your child pinch the sharpened end of the pencil and flip it around until it rests in proper writing position. Place a crumpled tissue between your child’s palm and last two fingers, and have them hold it there. It helps keep those extra fingers out of the way as they write.

Running the club had required constant physical labor, but once I was sitting at a desk writing all day I started putting on the pounds. As long as you have a pair of running shoes and a good road you can run to your heart’s content. The main thing was not the speed or the distance so much as running every day, without fail. Like eating, sleeping, housework, and writing, running was incorporated into my daily routine. If someone has an interest in long-distance running, he’ll start running on his own. Marathon running is not a sport for everyone, just as being a novelist isn’t a job for everyone. No matter how much long-distance running might suit me, of course there are days when I feel lethargic and don’t want to do it. Don’t you realize how fortunate you are? Compared with that, running an hour around the neighborhood is nothing, right? Then I lace up my running shoes and set off without hesitating.

The best thing about the story of Captain America is the implicit irony. Captain America begins as Steve Rogers-a man with the heart of a god and the body of a wimp. Dubbed Captain America, Rogers becomes the personification of his country’s egalitarian ideals-an anatomical Horatio Alger who through sheer grit and the wonders of science rises to become a national hero. Rogers’s transformation into Captain America is underwritten by the military. Conspirators against him rank all the way up to the White House, causing Rogers to, at one point, reject the very title of Captain America. At the end of World War II, Captain America is frozen in ice and awakens in our time-and this, too, distances him from his country and its ideals. Captain America, the embodiment of a kind of Lincolnesque optimism, poses a direct question for me: Why would anyone believe in The Dream? What is exciting here is not some didactic act of putting my words in Captain America’s head, but attempting to put Captain America’s words in my head. What is exciting is the possibility of exploration, of avoiding the repetition of a voice I’ve tired of. I’ve been lucky in my editors-Sana Amanat, who brought me on; Wil Moss, who edits Black Panther; Tom Brevoort, who’s editing Captain America; C.B. Cebulski, who just helped me refashion the script to the first issue; and Axel Alonso, who first broached the idea of me writing Cap.

Out for dinner with another writer, I said, “I think I’ve forgotten how to read.”. It’s been unnerving to realize: I have forgotten how to read – really read – and I’ve been refusing to talk about it out of pride. To read was to disappear, become enrobed in something beyond my own jittery ego. When we become cynical readers – when we read in the disjointed, goal-oriented way that online life encourages – we stop exercising our attention. What’s at stake is not whether we read. It’s how we read. And that’s something we’ll have to each judge for ourselves; it can’t be tallied by Statistics Canada. We should, instead, marvel at the fact we ever read books at all. Do they grab; do they anger? Can this be read without care? Are the sentences brief enough? And the thoughts? It’s tempting to let myself become so cynical a writer because I’m already such a cynical reader. So maybe that change into a cynical writer can be forestalled – if I can first correct my reading diet, remember how to read the way I once did.

Oh, gosh, I can’t believe it’s already the afternoon! The plan was to wake up early and be here by 9 A.M. to get to work on my novel. I’m writing a novel, and it’s going to have characters, conflict, dénouement-all that stuff. I’ve been telling every single person who will listen that I’m currently working on a novel, but it feels especially amazing to tell you right now. I don’t know if you heard me: I’m going to be writing a novel here in your café today! How exciting for you! One day, when I manage to actually write any part of this novel, you’ll get to tell people, “I saw him working on that novel in my café! He asked for the Wi-Fi password and then sat down to write the greatest work of the last fifteen-no, twenty-years!”. You know what a novel is, right? It’s like a long book. Please don’t call my name once my tiny coffee is ready, just in case I’m deep in the throes of writing my novel. As I’ve mentioned, I’m writing a novel with my hands and my brain.

At the end of 2017, the local news site Gothamist and seven of its city-centered affiliates were shut down shortly after the staff unionized, and on Tuesday, the beloved, uncategorizable blog the Awl announced that it, along with its sister site, the Hairpin, would cease operations at the end of the month. The Awl was founded, in 2009, by Choire Sicha and Alex Balk, who, along with the publisher David Cho, had been laid off by Radar Online the year before. Balk and Sicha were also Gawker alumni, and they picked “Be Less Stupid” as the Awl’s tagline; the deadpan tone of that phrase also showed up in their favored headline style: “Book Good,” “Man Gets Job.” In 2010, the Awl brought on Edith Zimmerman as the founder of the Hairpin, a women’s Web site that quickly established a niche in the eccentric and absurd. The Awl ran a poetry series that included Patricia Lockwood’s “Rape Joke” and a heroic crown of sonnets called “The Wrestler’s Book of Saints.” Seven years ago, Heather Havrilesky-whose “Ask Polly”advice column, now at New York, began at the Awl-wrote a joke post imagining Donald Trump in the Oval Office. Since 2012, the Awl has been running a series of daily New York City weather reviews by Tom Scocca-an oblique catalogue-memoir written in slush and sunlight. Sicha is now the editor of the Times’s Style section, and dozens of Awl contributors ended up with jobs at more stable media outlets, or with book deals: Jay Caspian Kang, Dave Bry, Mary H. K. Choi, Dan Kois, Reggie Ugwu, Michelle Dean, Nicole Cliffe, Anne Helen Petersen, Rachel Monroe, Vinson Cunningham, Jazmine Hughes, Mallory Ortberg, to name just a few. In 2010, David Carr observed, in a piece about the Awl for the Times, that the idea of a “Little digital boutique flies in the face of all manner of conventional wisdom, chief of which is that scale is all that matters in an era of commoditized advertising sales.” Nonetheless, the Awl’s focus on voice and sensibility seemed, at the time, to be working, even financially. Reading the Awl and the Hairpin, and then working with the people that ran them, had actually convinced me that the Internet was silly, fun, generative, and honest.